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Teju Cole - Every Day is For the Thief

Thursday, March 27, 2014 - 7:00pm

A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the “yahoo yahoo” diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet café, longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market. Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life, and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself.

In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author, Every Day Is for the Thief ($23.00) —originally published in Nigeria in 2007—is a wholly original work of fiction. This revised and updated edition is the first version of this unique book to be made available outside Africa. You’ve never read another book like this because no one writes like Teju Cole.

Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 and raised in Nigeria. His other novel, Open City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York City Book Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His photography has been exhibited in India and the United States. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY DWIGHT GARNER, "THE NEW YORK TIMES" NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY "San Francisco Chronicle - "NPR - "The Root - The Telegraph - The Globe and Mail"NATIONAL BESTSELLER - TEJU COLE WAS NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AFRICANS OF THE YEAR BY "NEW AFRICAN" MAGAZINE